Two Rules for Happy Living

There are two rules for happy living:

Be able to experience anything.

Cause only those things that others are able to experience easily.

Man has had many golden rules (rules of good conduct). The rule of “Do to others as you would like others do to you” has been repeated often. But such golden rules do not always result in sanity, success or happiness. They give no thought to what a person does about the things done to him by those who have not been taught the golden rules.

How do you handle the evil things done to you?

To be happy, you must be able to confront (which is to say, experience) those things that are there to be seen or experienced.

Unhappiness is only this: The inability to confront that which is there to be confronted.

Therefore you must follow the rule: 1. Be able to experience anything.

A definition of good conduct is to do only those things that others can easily and comfortably experience.

If you examine your past, you will find your attention can get stuck only on those actions you did that others were not able to receive.

For example, there was the time, when you were angry, you punched someone in the nose. Or there was the time you took someone’s cake and ate it yourself without telling the person.

The more actions a person did that could not be experienced by others, the worse a person’s past became. Seeing that he had caused many bad things, he stopped causing things at all—an unhappy state to be in.

Pain, upset and insanity all result from causing things that others could not experience easily.

All bad acts, then, are those acts that cannot be easily experienced by the person receiving them.

Using this definition, let us look at our own “bad acts” (overts). Which ones were bad? Only those that could not be easily experienced by another were bad. So, which of society’s bad acts are bad? They are the acts of violence that resulted in pain, unconsciousness or insanity, causing someone to experience heavy loss, like losing someone’s money.

What other acts of yours do you consider “bad”? The things that you have done that you could not easily yourself experience were bad. But the things that you have done that you yourself could have experienced, if they had been done to you, were not bad.

There is no need to lead a violent life just to prove you can experience. The idea is not to prove you can experience, but to get back the ability to experience anything.

Thus today we have two golden rules for happiness:

Be able to experience anything.

Cause only those things that others are able to experience easily.

If you follow these two golden rules, you will be one of the happiest and most successful people around.

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